Review of E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1946)

Professor Carr relies on an antithesis: ‘Every political situation contains mutually incompatible elements of Utopia and reality, of morality and power.’ Carr provides ‘the most comprehensive modern restatement, other than Marxist or Fascist, of the Hobbesian view of politics. It is from politics that both morality and law derive their authority. For Hobbes, the kingdom of the fairies was the Roman Catholic Church, seducing mankind with its enchantments. For Professor Carr, it is the League of Nations, which is no other than the ghost of the deceased Pax Britannica.’ Carr’s tome is ‘the one lasting intellectual monument of the policy of appeasement’. The first edition, published in 1939, praised Chamberlain’s policy as ‘a reaction of realism against Utopianism’, and defended the 1938 Munich agreement whereby Britain, France, Germany, and Italy agreed to the cession to Berlin of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. In the 1946 second edition ‘these passages are omitted’, Wight notes. ‘Wielding the realist critique at the expense of the moral critique, it is natural that Professor Carr should have moved since 1939 from support of collaboration with Germany to support of collaboration with Russia. But the Teheran–Yalta theory of world relationships is itself being swept from present realism into past Utopianism.’ In Wight’s view, ‘The student could have no better introduction to the fundamental problems of politics, provided always that he reads it side by side with Mr. Leonard Woolf’s deadly reply in “The War for Peace”.’

Sky’s the Limit

In this chapter, the author defends the claim that utopias can, and should, inform attempts to craft and effectuate successful programs of radical change. Specifically, it is argued that social and political organizing, even in response to seemingly intractable issues like systemic racial injustice, must ultimately be grounded in realistic utopian visions. This concept is borrowed from Erik Olin Wright and refined to argue that realistic utopias highlight the human potential for radical change and force us to recognize that the boundaries of what is possible are structurally contestable. The author conjoins this analysis with Elizabeth Anderson’s recent discussion of social movements as experiments in morality. For Anderson, social movements extend moral critique beyond the domain of mere theory by offering unique experiments in living morally. Along these lines, the chapter argues that the Movement for Black Lives offers a valuable case study in how we can experiment with realistic utopias.

A Marxian Reply to Hahnel: The Relative Explanatory Power of Marx’s Theory and Sraffa’s Theory

This paper critically examines Robin Hahnel’s 2017 book Radical Political Economy: Sraffa versus Marx and especially compares the relative explanatory power of Marx’s theory and Sraffa’s theory. Hahnel’s book argues that Sraffa’s theory is superior to Marx’s theory with respect to the following six subjects: prices, profit, technological change, crises, the environment, and moral critique (each one considered in a separate chapter). This paper challenges Hahnel’s arguments on all six subjects and argues that Marx’s theory has greater explanatory power than Sraffa’s theory and continues to be the best critical theory of capitalism. JEL Classification: B24, B51

Political Leadership

This chapter draws on the fields of politics and performance to analyze the nature of leadership performance in contemporary political societies. It recovers neglected themes about leadership performance originally articulated by two political thinkers deeply interested in the role of public performance by political leaders, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Walter Bagehot, both of whom can help strengthen contemporary appraisals of leadership performance. The two thinkers evaluate leadership performance quite differently, using different performance standards. The eighteenth-century philosopher Rousseau devised a moral critique of modern liberalism, including a detailed evaluation of underdeveloped modes of leadership performance typical of modern liberal political regimes. Rousseau’s alternative leadership morality sketched in The Social Contract remains a powerful source for contemporary analysis of the limits of liberalism and of the options for more egalitarian, republican alternatives.

Filming Change: Civil Rights through the Lens of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? and To Kill a Mockingbird

The 1960s were a turbulent decade in the United States. Significant social changes, especially in the realm of antiracism and antisexism, were afoot. Concurrently, in an echo to such dramatic social change, popular culture was also evolving. This article examines two relevant films to evaluate their ability to perform a moral critique of gender and racial politics in the 1960s. Alongside an analysis of social and political trends and Supreme Court cases, I compare two critically acclaimed industry films, To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), to better understand cultural and political reforms in the 20th century.

‘no human shape’: Unformed Life in The Unnamable

This chapter argues that Beckett’s antipathy to normative ideas of bodily and aesthetic form derives from his resistance to the Nazi politics of art. It utilises theories from disability studies and the work of Michel Foucault and Roberto Esposito to reconsider Beckett’s post-war aesthetic of deformation, framing it as a response to the inextricable connection between biopolitics and aesthetic form in the Third Reich. It offers a reading of The Unnamable that deviates from critical accounts that cast Beckett’s text as a redemptive moral critique of Nazi biopolitics. Beckett denies the reassuring conflation of degenerate artistry with passive, nonviolent exposure to Nazi violence. The degenerate artist, as figured in The Unnamable, is both victim and perpetrator in a closed circuit of biopolitical violence and aesthetic (de)formation.

Sex and Power in Cassius Dio’s Roman History

This article contributes to our understanding of Dio’s technique of using sexual discourse as a useful tool of characterisation and ethical and historical interpretation. It also aims to advance our understanding of the role of sexual-moral critique in ancient historiography more generally. In the first part, it argues that comments on sexual matters in Dio’s history contribute to the construction of imperial portraits and the evaluation of an emperor. Sexual transgressions regularly coalesce with other bad characteristics of a ruler and his overall tyrannical behaviour. In the second part it is suggested that Dio’s representation of Elagabalus is considerably peculiar in terms of both its narrative technique and content, including themes and stories that unfold in significantly different and unexpected ways. Sexual misconduct is not simply associated with other vices, but is also used as a significant stand-alone category in the historian’s assessment of Elagabalus’ character and reign. This understanding of Dio’s technique, it is proposed, makes not only a historiographical point, but also a significant historical one about Elagabalus, his rule, and the state of the Roman Empire at the time.